Science Made Cool

Not Exactly Totally Welcome News

As part of my ongoing effort to exercise more regularly, I joined my daughter when she signed up for a beginner’s fencing class – and found myself the only parent in a class of 12 to 16 year olds. I expected that the younger students would have an advantage over me in our bouts – they were all in much better shape and didn’t tire out nearly as fast as I did – but most of the time I scored as many if not more touches as they did. An article that appeared online this month in the journal Neurobiology of Aging suggests one reason why. Unfortunately it also suggests that, for me, it’s all downhill from here.

The study, led by Dr. George Bartzokis at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA assessed how the speed of motor processing corellates with the integrity of the myelin sheaths covering neurons in the brain. They found that the two are correlated – neurons covered in myelin transmit nerve impulses faster, so brains that contain more myelin are also faster processors. But they also found that myelin integrity isn’t a static thing: as people age, more and more neurons in the brain get covered with myelin, speeding up cognitive and motor processing speed, eventually reaching a peak at age 39. After that, myelin starts to break down faster than it’s repaired, slowing down the transmission of impulses from brain to muscles. Guess how old I am?

So right now, the lag time between my *decisions* to parry, disengage, and riposte and my clumsy attempts to carry the actions out occur faster (on average) than my classmates’. But I’m poised at the crest of a long downhill slide. Eventually, my daughter is going to beat me every time.

Monster Mash (9)

Most of the classic movie monsters are fairly human -- they can be played by someone in makeup. Dracula? Guy in a cape. Frankenstein's monster? Guy with skull bolts. Even the werewolf on screen became Lon Chaney under a lot of fur.

The first movie I know of that actually boasted non-human monsters was Merian Cooper's King Kong. Kong wasn't a funny-looking person, he was a titanic ape. He was huge and powerful and scary.

And Hollywood more or less forgot about him for twenty years. The black and white golden age of horror movies concentrated on human monsters. It was only in the "Atomic Horror" era of the 1950s that obviously non-human movie monsters made a comeback. The milestone was 1954. That year saw the release of Them! in the United States and Godzilla in Japan. Everybody knows about Godzilla, but Them! is an excellent and terribly under-rated movie. It's about giant ants (roughly the size of cars) spawned in the desert by the first atomic tests. The storytelling is first-rate: rather than simply showing us people wrestling with big bugs, the film is a scientific detective story. The heroes have to discover the giant ants, figure out where they are hiding, and work out a way to defeat them. Science (atomic stuff) caused the monster, but only Science can defeat it.

These new monsters weren't at all human -- big bugs and lizards, with the occasional giant bird or octopus for variety. They were powerful and destructive, and often came from other planets. (They were also scientifically absurd, one and all.)

The conventional wisdom is that the big monsters of the Fifties represent anxiety about the atomic bomb -- certainly it's hard to miss the parallel when Godzilla is tearing up Tokyo with his radioactive flame breath, or George Pal's Martians are blowing Los Angeles to smithereens with heat rays. But I wonder if the trend to more alien, inhuman monsters also reflects the experience of World War II.

Quite simply, the Nazi regime managed to perpetrate worse horrors than any of the Universal Studios horror monsters ever dreamed of. Dracula wanted to suck a few people's blood. Frankenstein's monster was mad at his creator. None of them bombed cities, invaded other countries, or murdered millions of people in cold blood. So I wonder if, after spending the 1940s reading newspapers, seeing newsreels, and sometimes fighting in battles, the audiences simply couldn't work up much concern about a vampire lurking in an old dark house. Once you've seen Hitler and Stalin, Dracula's pretty small potatoes. Hence the need for bigger, newer monsters.

A Powerful New Force For Good

Sick of pseudoscience, quackery, and fraud? There's a new blog in town dedicated to smashing all that is bogus:  behold the mighty SKEPTICBLOG!

Bad Idea? Or VERY BAD IDEA?

A group of computer scientists at RPI have created what is apparently the world's first deliberately evil artificial intelligence. This is just asking for some underpaid post-doc to accidentally give it control of deadly robot war machines. Don't people watch movies any more?

Seriously, the project is actually an attempt to study moral reasoning -- attempting to work out the logical foundation of morality. That's a very interesting project, especially if it can lead to a basis for morality which doesn't rest on supernatural authority (or sheer brute force).

A tip of the tinfoil hat to the mighty Io9 blog.

Monster Mash (8)

The ultimate icon of Halloween is a grinning pumpkin with a candle inside, the Jack-o'Lantern.  The name comes from Irish legend, about an accursed wanderer too wicked for Heaven but too good for Hell, who walks the Earth carrying a light in a carved turnip. In America, the native pumpkin replaced the turnip (they're bigger, easier to carve, and taste better). And since Halloween falls just after pumpkin harvesting time, the connection between the two was inevitable.

The original legend seems to have been a variant on the Will-o-the-wisp, which takes its name from a similar legend of a wandering spirit carrying a light. Both stories refer to the very real phenomenon if the "ignis fatuus" -- mysterious lights seen at night.

So what were those nighttime lights? Assuming they weren't medieval Irishmen or Englishmen out at night on disreputable errands by lantern-light? Scientists have been wondering about that for centuries. The most common explanation is hydrogen phosphide and/or methane produced by rotting vegetation. This is the famous "swamp gas" which J. Allen Hynek put forth as the explanation for some Michigan UFO sightings. One can certainly believe that would be a common enough phenomenon in peat-rich Ireland.

But the world is full of mysterious lights -- the Wikipedia entry on "ghost lights" has a page-long list of folk names for weird lights seen at night. Are the conditions for luminous gas production that common? Hard to say.

The simple truth is this:  people sometimes see lights at night, especially when they are alone or in unfamiliar country. If you're a medieval Irishman you see a wandering spirit, or trooping fairies, or the Devil with a lantern. If you're a Cold War era American you see a flying saucer.

But if you're out on Friday night, it's probably a kid with a flashlight looking for candy. Or possibly a Dalek.

Friday Parasite: An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles

At first, the adult nematodes of the species Pristionchus pacificus don’t seem to be particularly out of the ordinary. Like many other nematode species, they’re small (about 1 mm long), live in the soil, and eat bacteria and fungi. But a closer look at their entire life cycle reveals that the worms spend their youth mooching off another animal.

Adult worms are self-fertilizing hermaphrodites – that is, each worm has both male and female sex organs, and is (ahem) perfectly capable of getting itself pregnant. Worms lay their eggs in the soil, where they hatch, but the larval worms don’t stay there for long. Instead of molting and growing in soil, larval P. pacificus start looking for a beetle to ride (their particular host is the Oriental beetle Exomala orientalis) by cuing in on their sex pheromones. When a larval worm finds an appropriate beetle, it bores into its cuticle. Then it goes dormant and waits for the insect to die. When the beetle’s rotting corpse becomes home to a veritable smorgasborg of bacteria and fungi, the worm comes out of dormancy and feasts until it can make the final molt into adulthood and move out of its childhood home.

Photo: Dr. Ralf Sommer, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

Monster Mash (7)

Frequently at Halloween time one hears of trick-or-treaters costumed as "ghosts and goblins." It's a nicely alliterative phrase, but in forty years of being a trick-or-treater, a homeowner, and a parent, I've never seen any one dressed up as a goblin.

What is a goblin, anyway? The mighty Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word may come from ancient Greek "Kobalos" meaning a wicked person or spirit. It may also be related to the Germanic word "Kobold" meaning a mischievous spirit which haunted mines. (One prank kobolds played on German miners would be to replace good ore with an inferior metal -- the worthless stuff was called "cobalt.")

In Katharine Briggs's Encyclopedia of Fairies she describes goblins as "evil and malicious spirits, usually small and grotesque in appearance." A slightly less wicked goblin might get a friendly nickname -- "Hob" (short for Robert), giving us "Hobgoblin."

Modern roleplaying gamers know goblins well from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. In D&D and other games, goblins are classic "mooks" -- low-powered opponents whose chief purpose is to get slaughtered by player-characters. This version is of course based on the goblins of Tolkein's The Hobbit, in which a dozen dwarves and a hobbit, with a little help from their wizard buddy, are able to defeat and escape from a whole mountain full of goblins.

Whatever their derivation, goblins seem pretty well-defined -- they're ugly little bastards who cause trouble. They're personifications of entropy and chaos. They're the grinning, malicious flip side of the beautiful, seductive kind of fairy. Even in Tolkein, the goblins were chaotic and spiteful.

And that, I think, solves the mystery of the Halloween goblins. There's no need for anyone to dress up as one, because on Halloween night the streets are full of small, grotesque beings, and there's still an undercurrent of malice in their demands for treats to avoid a trick. On Halloween, we all are goblins.

Monster Mash (6)

Witches occupy an interestingly ambiguous role in the Halloween pantheon.  They aren't monsters -- witches are at least ostensibly human. And increasingly over the past couple of centuries, witches have moved out of the realm of horror entirely. 

To ancient cultures, witches were real and scary. I expect they were real, too. David Brin has pointed out that magic doesn't do much that's useful in daily life -- but magic is extremely useful for making people fear and respect a "magician" and give him food or money. Witches knew stuff -- both the words "Witch" and "Wizard" ultimately derive from terms meaning "wise or knowledgeable." Witches probably combined some genuine knowledge of folk medicine with a generous dollop of fortune-telling and con artistry.

The Halloween picture of the witch -- old woman, pointy hat, uncomfortable shoes -- seems to date from the 17th century, or from 19th century depictions of the 17th century. The Reformation era was the golden age of witch-hunts, as the breakdown of the unified Church left everyone convinced that the Devil was abroad in the world. Despite the rather overheated claims of neo-pagans, there wasn't any large-scale organized persecution of witches by Christian churches. Instead, there seem to have been plenty of local, small-scale, hysteria-fueled witchcraft panics. The most famous, of course, was in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, which is why witches look like old women from Salem circa 1700.

Beginning in the 19th century, witches began to get rehabilitated. The first stage, of course, was simply contempt for the ignorant Puritans and/or Catholics who did the actual witch-hunting. Then Margaret Murray and Sir James Frazer postulated that witchcraft was a survival of pre-Christian pagan religion. (It isn't.) The stage was set for witches to make the transition from scary senders of curses and disease to misunderstood feminist alternative-medicine practitioners.

In the modern era, the mantle of witchcraft has fallen to two groups, which overlap in places. The first group are the Wiccans and related "neo-pagan" religions. I'm not going to debate the truth of someone's spiritual beliefs, but I will point out that Gerald Gardner made the whole thing up in the 1950s and nobody has been able to find evidence of an older tradition.

The second group may or may not believe in "witchcraft" as a spiritual system, but they do continue the ancient role of witches -- using magic to make people give them money. They range from storefront "psychic advisors" on the wrong side of the railroad tracks all the way to television psychics like John Edward, who talks to dead people whose relatives have paid him handsomely. These modern witches are truly evil, as they prey on ignorance, worry, and grief. For them, I recommend the advice of the Bible, Exodus 22:18 -- "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

Monster Mash (5)

I've always wondered why ghosts are supposed to be scary. Most other legendary monsters are "predators" or "parasites" of some kind -- if you encounter them, they want to harm you, no matter who you are.

But ghosts, in the sense of restless spirits of the dead, always seem to be agents of vengeance or justice. You get haunted because you did something, or because someone else did something that made the soul of a dead person so unhappy it haunts the living. If you think about it, ghosts are really a reassuring legend rather than a source of horror. Ghosts prove the universe is moral. That evil cannot be hidden, even by death. 

Which is why it's such a shame that ghosts don't exist. For nearly two centuries, scientifically-minded sorts have been looking into ghost sightings, wondering if there's any truth to them. And they've found precisely nothing. Outfits like the Ghost Club, the Society for Psychical Research, the Ghost Research Society, and dozens of free-lance individuals have poked around haunted sites, and what have they found? Some patently faked photos, some patently faked audiotapes, and some patently bogus chatter about "cold spots" and "presences."

There's a paradox here, as in most paranormal investigation. Tales of the supernatural describe vivid, terrifying, physical events -- a ghost appearing to someone, fairies doing mischief, flying saucer aliens manifesting themselves, whatever. Inspired by these amazing reports, "paranormal investigators" look into the situation. What do they find? They don't find showy ghosts, flying saucers, fairies, or werewolves. What they find are vague, barely-measurable, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't traces. They announce these as proof -- but the "proof" isn't anything like the phenomena as originally described!

This has a perfect parallel in Creationism. For Creationists, the big paranormal event is God making the world in seven days, approximately 6,000 years ago. But when supporters of "intelligent design" try to demonstrate it scientifically, all they can produce are minor inconsistencies in the fossil record, blatant misunderstandings of how natural selection works, and undisprovable "alternate theories." In most cases they've retreated completely out of the Biblical account and are reduced to looking for God hiding in the cracks of geology and cosmology.

And ultimately, God and ghosts have a common origin: people want to believe in a moral universe. They want to believe their lives have meaning that will endure past death. The creationist and the ghost hunter are both struggling to find scientific proof for something which is entirely outside science's realm. But because science has done such an amazing job of describing and recording the universe we live in, anything it can't describe no longer seems real, even to believers.

This suggests that the true solution for conflicts of faith vs. science is for the believers to have more faith rather than less! A sufficiently faithful Christian (or whatever religion you prefer) can believe in God even if the Bible is proved wrong word for word. Perhaps the ones who attack science or try to twist it aren't real fanatics, but instead are tormented by doubts.

Another Tangled Bank

The 116th edition of the Tangled Bank blog carnival is up at Pro-Science. Lots of links for everyone to enjoy.